TV GUIDE OCTOBER 2 – 8 1993 By: Frank Swertlow
VICTORIA’S SECRETS: A TV favorite reveals what she’s learned about keeping her looks, her money, and her men.After surviving two decades in Hollywood, Victoria Principal reveals how she handles fear, success, marriage, and guns.
Victoria Principal is piloting her red Acura NSX sports car toward the Beverly Hills Gun Club in West Los Angeles when she begins to freak out. At the sight of the Santa Monica Freeway, her face turns ashen and she swerves into a frenzied U-turn. She has driven the car 120 mph on a racetrack, but the freeway causes her to flash back to a collision with a drunk driver she suffered 25 years ago. The memory causes a panic attack. “I break out in a complete sweat,” she says. “I am in a state of uncontrollable anxiety.”
There’s not much else that unnerves Principal these days. Since leaving a nine-year run on “Dallas” in 1987, she has been successfully producing and starring in TV-movies. The latest, “River of Rage: The Taking of Maggie Keene” (which she did not produce), will air this week. As a divorcee hunted by a drug dealer (Peter Onorati), she scrambles over rocks, jumps 90 feet into the raging Rio Grande, and defends herself with a shotgun. It was filmed in Arizona terrain so rugged that Principal was flown to each location by helicopter.
“I was knocked out that a woman was going to carry a film about surviving the odds,” says Principal, who didn’t worry about mussing her hair or battering her body. “I loved the physicality of it.”
Calming down from her freeway ordeal, Principal arrives at the Gun Club and takes out a pair of .38s to brush up on her shooting skills. She puts on her prescription sunglasses and concentrates on a target. Three shots rip into the kill zone. If this were a man, he’d be dead.
“In Georgia, we lived near my grandmother’s farm, and we used to put up Coke bottles and shoot them,” she says. “That was truly idyllic.”
Victoria Principal looks sweet but plays tough. Ever since she arrived in Hollywood, the daughter of an Air Force senior master sergeant, she has shown remarkable resilience. Insecure at various times about her looks, her acting skills and her ability to fit into the Hollywood scene, she has learned to keep re-making herself. She has been actress, agent, and producer. Recently, she’s become one of the most successful pitch-women in the world of television infomercials. In one weekend appearance on QVC last month, she sold more than $2.25 million worth of her Principal Secret skin -–and hair-care products.
At age 43, she’s happy, confident, and rich. Married since 1985 to plastic surgeon Harry Glassman, her home life seems comforting and stable. But it hasn’t always been so easy. After two decades in Hollywood, she’s learned some lessons and developed her own set of “secrets” for surviving in a tough town.
BEWARE OF FLATTERERS: After making her film debut in 1972 as Paul Newman’s mistress in “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,” Principal was a certified starlet. “I thought all the people suddenly inviting me over to dinner really liked me,” she says. But the next movies she made were flops. “When I no longer was invited places, it shattered me. I thought when you failed at something, friends consoled you. Instead, I found myself in exile. I withdrew so nobody would know how badly hurt I was.”
FIGHT FOR YOURSELF: In May 1990, Principal sued CBS for $300,000 she said was owed to her for a TV series that was never actually made. “I don’t know about you, but where I come from, $300,000 is a lot of money,” she said then. “It was business, not personal.” Another time, Joan Rivers released Principal’s unlisted home phone number on the air. She also sued – but says she can’t talk about the settlement except to add coyly, “Come and see my Picasso.”
IGNORE RUMORS: When a gorgeous actress is married to a plastic surgeon, everyone assumes her good looks get some professional help. “When I married my husband, was I a dog?” she jokes. “Did I bark? Think about it. Isn’t it odd that all this started after I got married? It used to bother me more than it does now.”
Would she have cosmetic surgery? Principal won’t give a simple yes or no. “I don’t ever want to look in the mirror and not recognize myself,” she says. “If someone has taken care of herself and eats well and exercises but still looks tired, there is a way to fix that cosmetically. But it breaks my heart to see people who have so transformed their features that they don’t look like themselves. Getting older is obviously inevitable. I am going to do this as gracefully as possible. The other option is death, and I have chosen getting older.”
Principal has also been dogged by rumors about why she remained childless. (Her husband has two children from a previous marriage, and she is close to them). “Maybe it is time to answer this question,” she says. “I have always been reticent, and I know there have been rumors that I didn’t have children because of my vanity. I didn’t have children because I can’t have children. It was the luck of the draw. I was blessed with two wonderful stepchildren, but it is a loss. It was certainly what I would have done. The question is, how many.”
TRUST YOUR JUDGMENT: When advisers told her not to appear in infomercials, she ignored them and went on to make millions. “Everybody told me it could be the end of my career,"” she says. "“here was that old 'snake oil’ reputation that maybe people used infomercials to sell products that were phony. I made an unprecedented offer – you could use all of a product or keep it for 60 days and still get your money back if you didn’t like it. I felt confident. It was a personal guarantee.”
TAKE RISKS: Principal left “Dallas” while the show was still hot, worried that if she stayed any longer, she would be forever typecast. “There is no such thing as a safety net,” she says. “To the best of my knowledge, no leading actress on a prime-time soap had ever left and gone on to a career after that. It was death out there. What I tried to do was lay the ground for my new career (as producer).” The role is right for her, “I must have been a man in my last life,” she says. “I love making a deal. The top of my head comes off, It is euphoric.”
She has taken chances with more than her career. On New Years’ Day of 1990, she paraglided off one of the highest mountain ranges in Switzerland. “I needed to confront one big fear,” she says. “I wanted to experience this. It was remarkable. There was one moment where the fear came up through my feet, and it threatened to paralyze me. I felt this nausea and I just breathed through it. I didn’t deny the fear. It set the tone for the ‘90s. Little things don’t bother me. I didn’t want little fears to mess up my life.” (Her freeway phobia, though, is “a big thing”).
GIVE YOURSELF ANOTHER CHANCE: In 1975 Principal gave up acting and became a talent agent because, she says, “I wasn’t sure of who I was. I felt people were trying to change me to fit what they wanted, and I could never live up to it. For the first time in my life, I didn’t depend on how I looked. I created myself when I came to Hollywood; I re-created myself when I became an agent and recreated myself when I was on “Dallas” and I probably re- created myself again when I left and became a producer.”
Principal was often told when younger that she was too exotic for Hollywood. “Back then, you were supposed to look as Waspy as possible. In an overcompensation in 1975, I became blond. I dieted until I was so thin my figure was not as obvious. I was trying to fit into a mold, a vision, an illusion. I finally threw myself a life preserver. I didn’t want to live my life being sick, being too thin, or too blond. I got out. I started my life over.”
KEEP SOME PART OF YOUR LIFE PRIVATE: When she first came to Hollywood, Principal was seen regularly with Frank Sinatra and other well-connected men. She had a long relationship with singer Andy Gibb, who died in 1988. On- screen, she doesn’t mind nude scenes – but she has a problem with love scenes.
“How you touch someone when you love them and the sounds and the feelings you have in the act of love are so intimate and so private,” she says. “That is the only area in acting where I feel such an invasion. I make an extraordinary effort not to do the things that I would really do as a lover. It is very difficult to invent a different way of touching, a different way of sounding when you love someone. It’s a push-pull all the time. I always feel like I am giving up something of me.”
But as long as she sticks with her principles, she never will.
